Historic Huguenot St Hosts Candlelight Tour, Lecture

Historic Huguenot Street (HHS), located on the banks of the Wallkill River where small group of French-speaking Huguenots settled in 1678, is today, just steps from downtown New Paltz. The site features seven stone houses dating to 1705, a burying ground and a reconstructed 1717 stone church – all in their original village setting.

This Friday and Saturday HHS is offering two unique programs. On Friday, a Candlelight Tour that features the historic Deyo and Jean Hasbrouck houses, and more on Saturday &#8220Before Stone: Early Structures of the New Paltz Region,&#8221 a talk offered as part of the HHS’s Second Saturdays lecture series.

Candlelight Tour

On Friday, March 12th at 7pm, HHS will present a special Candlelight Tour. In the Jean Hasbrouck House, guests will have an opportunity to experience the house as few do – by the nighttime candlelight that would have been part of every late winter evening in the 1700s. Guides will talk about how light, the scarcity of it and the need to capture as much natural light as possible informed both design and function of the houses. Unique lighting implements from the collections at Historic Huguenot Street, including the betty lamp, will be featured and discussed.

Across the street in the Deyo House, guests will experience one of the village’s finest houses just at the time that electric light has come to the village. The Brodheads, then in residence, take advantage of this new innovation, but continue to live by the soft, warm glow they knew from gas and candlelight. The result is a transition from the old to the new.

The tour will begin at 7pm in the DuBois Fort Visitor Center, where guests can enjoy a glass of wine or sparkling water before departing down a candlelit path to the museum houses. The DuBois Fort is located at 81 Huguenot Street in New Paltz.

Saturday, “Before Stone” Talk Focuses on Earliest Homes

&#8220Before Stone: Early Structures of the New Paltz Region, will be a talk offered on Saturday, March 13th as part of the Second Saturdays lecture series at Historic Huguenot Street.

Until recently, not much was known about what came before the iconic stone houses. Family histories told us that the stone houses dated to the late 1600s. Investigation and research conducted in the past several years have revealed that the houses were not built until the early 1700s. This begged the question of what the community’s early Huguenot founders lived in for almost thirty years. Archaeology on the site has also improved our understanding of how Native Americans lived on the site prior to European contact.

Architect Amanda Lewkowicz and Richard Heyl de Ortiz, Director of Community Relations at Historic Huguenot Street, will offer and informative and interesting talk about this evolving understanding of these structures. The talk will be offered on Saturday, March 13th at 7pm at the DuBois Fort Visitor Center, 81 Huguenot Street, in New Paltz. The talk is $7 per person ($5 for Friends of Huguenot Street).

Reservations are not required for either event, but are suggested. For more information, visit www.huguenotstreet.org or call (845) 255-1889.

HHS offers six acres of landscaped green space and public programming to the local community and visitors from around the world. For more information about Historic Huguenot Street, visit www.huguenotstreet.org or call (845) 255-1660.

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